1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the storage of binary data in a compressed form. More particularly, the present invention relates to the storage and access of binary data for subsequent generation on a display.
2. Art Background
Binary data, such as that representative of a graphical or pixel image, or data representative of a Signal wave form, is typically stored in one of two ways. In a first method, the binary values are simply stored in a buffer or memory. Although advantageous due to its simplicity of implementation, as the size of the binary stream increases so does the amount of memory required to store the information. Therefore, it is typically preferred to store the binary stream in a compressed form.
One widely used compressed format is referred to as the store-on-change format. This format is effective for highly repetitive binary data. In a system which utilizes a store-on-change format, an entry in a list is created each time the state of the binary data changes. A parameter associated with each entry identifies the length of the binary string for a particular data value. Although this format works well with data which consists of long strings of constant binary data values, the amount of memory needed to store a rapidly or frequently changing binary string is quite significant.
As is well known in the art, other data compression techniques have been developed to save on the amount of memory required to store the data. However, these techniques can be quite complex and require significant processing overhead.